ABCe: Guardian.co.uk breaks 20m user barrier

Thursday 24 July 2008 07.34 EDT
First published on Thursday 24 July 2008 07.34 EDT

Guardian.co.uk has become the first UK newspaper site to attract more than 20 million unique users in a month.

Official traffic figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic for June showed the site recorded a 12% increase in users from the previous month, up to 20,499,858 in June.

Page views also reached a record for the site, at 183,178,155.

Telegraph.co.uk continued strong year-on-year growth of 179% to 19,712,622 unique users, an increase of 7% from May. Page views reached a record 151,857,375.

Times Online grew by 3% from May to 16,369,620 unique users or 70% up from June 2007. The site saw 117,743,288 page views.

Mail Online saw a surprising fall in traffic from the previous month, with a 14% drop to 16,015,211 unique users. Traffic was still 69% up year on year. Page views fell for the second consecutive month to 119,483,455.

The fall means the gap between Sun Online and Mail Online has narrowed again, with Sun Online rising 4% from May to 15,510,242. The site has seen its audience grow 72% from June 2007.

Sun Online, a network including page3.com and the Sun Bingo site, saw page views reach the highest for any UK newspaper website to date at 291,102,281.

Mirror.co.uk saw a 12% increase from May to 5,426,320 unique users in its fourth public audit figure. It does not report page views.

Independent.co.uk, which released its ABCe figures for the first time last month, recorded 7,215,928 unique users, up 10% from the previous month. Page views rose to 27,533,972.

Guardian News and Media's director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the site's sports' coverage had performed well in June, particularly coverage of Euro 2008. Some sites decided to scale back coverage when England failed to make the tournament.

"Also in the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity.

"If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant," she said.

Bell said the industry was moving towards a more comprehensive way of representing a user's engagement with a site, rather than focusing on the number of users.

"Unique users is still useful for users and advertisers because it is a measurement everyone understands," she said, but added that publishers were working towards the "holy grail" of measuring engagement, such as time spent on a site.

"We do know what high-frequency users look like, and those are up 9% from March to June."

The Telegraph Media Group digital editor, Edward Roussel, also attributed growth to the site's sport offering.

"Telegraph sport was hugely popular in June," he said.

"The Telegraph has a fantastic reputation for sport and our readers enjoyed content varying from football transfer news, Telegraph Fantasy Football, Wimbledon and Euro 2008. Our coverage of the ongoing credit crunch was also key to our growth in audience."

With the exception of Mail Online, all sites saw their UK user number rise during June.

UK users represent the most valuable audience for advertisers because the commercial activity of most news publishers is still domestically focused.

Guardian.co.uk recorded the highest UK audience at 8,463,172.

Telegraph.co.uk had 6,466,996 UK users during June and Times Online 5,731,085.